Allied Electronics, based in Texas, appears to be the first local retailer to sell the cheaper edition to the American market. Nearly two months ago, the Model A finally went on sale in Europe. Sales in Asia followed about a month later. However, for at least a week now, a German electronics shop has been selling the Model A to Americans on eBay for $38.50, and other British eBay sellers are selling combo editions including a case.

The $25 Model A's cost savings comes from skimping on an Ethernet port and including just a single USB port. This means the Model A needs only one-third the power that the Model B requires. (Conceivably, this also implies it's better-suited for solar-powered hobbyist projects.)

On its website, Allied Electronics offers this notice:

“Due to limited supply of the Raspberry Pi Model A, we are not offering preorders or backorders on the product at this time. The Raspberry Pi Model A will only be available for purchase when we have inventory on hand to fill the order. We regret this inconvenience and sincerely thank you for your patience.”

As of this writing, Allied Electronics lists 49 remaining in stock, but we’re guessing that those are going to go pretty fast. (Disclosure: When I saw that early Sunday morning, I ordered two.) If you don’t manage to get a Model A, Amazon has the Model B Revision 2.0 (with the 512MB RAM bump) for $45.

UPDATE 12:45pm: The Model A has sold out on the Allied Electronics website.

Eben Upton, the founder of Raspberry Pi, wrote Ars to say that the Model A is "now on sale worldwide. The delay was caused by the need to get some items of US import paperwork completed, and by the desire of our distributors to make sure they had at least some stock in place worldwide before launch."

"We expect it to be available from the same resellers as the Model B in due course."

I would honestly just mass produce them, I don't get the numbers they produce at all. They are always low on stock, and yet it's a high demand product.

The guys that started this literally mortgaged their homes to be able to start producing them. They're actually producing them at a far higher rate than they ever intended to, and they even completely switched how they're produced to try to better meet the demand (which delayed the initial production rounds for a while).

The RPi Foundation has been continually ramping up production, but they don't have the resources of any large company that can just throw oodles of money to do huge initial production runs.

These are very cool and useful devices for a large range of projects. I am currently setting on up to be used as a process-control monitor talking to instruments via GPIB and displaying the information on a website. You cannot beat the price and the fact that it already has integrated video outputs. I am unsure about the usefulness of the 'A' model, though, since the price difference is only $10. For the extra two cups of Starbucks, you get twice the RAM and an additional USB port, and the Ethernet port, which makes the 'B' model so convenient for integration into remote-controlled applications. If you need to add remote capabilities to the 'A' model, you need to use a USB WiFi adapter, which will take up the single available USB port. For more ports, you would therefore need to add a powered USB hub; so much for saving money and power with the 'A' model. I think they should rather produce a 'C' model with integrated WiFi / Bluetooth / 1GB of RAM. Charge me an extra $15 for that one;-)

Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I'm using it to learn Linux and then Python.

I've never wanted to dual boot my PC because I'm a noob and would probably mess it up beyond repair if I dual booted, but with the RasPi I can play around to my heart's content and never worry. It's been a huge, fun learning experience for me and I can only imagine what a life changer it would be for a 12 year old.

The primary reason this was created was for education. A quick look at their site http://www.raspberrypi.org/ pretty much tells the tale. Take a look at the site, you'll be amazed what people are doing with this little miracle.

Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I'm using it to learn Linux and then Python.

I've never wanted to dual boot my PC because I'm a noob and would probably mess it up beyond repair if I dual booted, but with the RasPi I can play around to my heart's content and never worry. It's been a huge, fun learning experience for me and I can only imagine what a life changer it would be for a 12 year old.

You should also try VirtualBox unless you have extraordinarily old hardware. 8GB or less of space on your hard disk get's you a fully working copy of any linux distro you choose without risking breaking the boot sector and without needing another set of peripheral hardware.

Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I'm using it to learn Linux and then Python.

I've never wanted to dual boot my PC because I'm a noob and would probably mess it up beyond repair if I dual booted, but with the RasPi I can play around to my heart's content and never worry. It's been a huge, fun learning experience for me and I can only imagine what a life changer it would be for a 12 year old.

You should also try VirtualBox unless you have extraordinarily old hardware. 8GB or less of space on your hard disk get's you a fully working copy of any linux distro you choose without risking breaking the boot sector and without needing another set of peripheral hardware.

I was going to mention the same thing with VMWare player. Some distros are already built in a .vmdk - right now I'm playing with one from Puppet Labs.

Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I'm using it to learn Linux and then Python.

I've never wanted to dual boot my PC because I'm a noob and would probably mess it up beyond repair if I dual booted, but with the RasPi I can play around to my heart's content and never worry. It's been a huge, fun learning experience for me and I can only imagine what a life changer it would be for a 12 year old.

You should also try VirtualBox unless you have extraordinarily old hardware. 8GB or less of space on your hard disk get's you a fully working copy of any linux distro you choose without risking breaking the boot sector and without needing another set of peripheral hardware.

Or could just use a USB drive and boot Linux from that to operate in a sandbox.

Life of (Raspberry) Pi, though it has sold a million units the future (debatably) does not look bright based on what it has to offer. A gadget for $25 or $35 (Amazon shows over $40 and if there are taxes it would be closer to $50) with no screen (yes, the aim is different) has to compete with tablets (Akash Tablet) that are available for $35. Minor modifications to tablet can be a Pi Killer.

No Ethernet, no USB host, no GPIO (this is absurdly important for anyone doing hardware work!), no video out (HDMI+RCA), no community of developers around it documenting everything and coming up with ways to accomplish awesome stuff.

No, that tablet isn't a Raspberry Pi killer. To claim so really misses a lot of the point of the Raspberry Pi. It might take away a few use cases (i.e. only the people buying the Pi as a cheap computer, which is virtually no one), but it won't come near touching the vast majority (all the awesome hacks), nor the use case the Foundation intends the Pi to be for (a learning aid).

There seems to be a ton of people who don't get what the RPI is intended for. I have read on many occasions that people compare them to smartphones, mini ITX systems, tablets and the likes. They are all missing the point.

You have to compare the RPI to things like the Arduino. It is not a consumption device and that it can be used to do XBMC stuff is not the purpose, but a nice gimmick.Think of it as a crazily overpowered microcontroller with a framebuffer. Then you see why some el cheapo Chinese tablet is not going to cut it. Even if they had GPIO pins, I wouldn't want to waste my time breaking them open and soldering some kind of header to them, only to find out using them is flaky for one reason or the other.

Life of (Raspberry) Pi, though it has sold a million units the future (debatably) does not look bright based on what it has to offer. A gadget for $25 or $35 (Amazon shows over $40 and if there are taxes it would be closer to $50) with no screen (yes, the aim is different) has to compete with tablets (Akash Tablet) that are available for $35. Minor modifications to tablet can be a Pi Killer.

Your article reads like an uninformed eighth grader, complete with two sentences that aren't sentences and a plethora of other spelling and grammar mistakes. (Nobel is a prize - noble is the adjective you're looking for to describe a cause.) This is a hobbyist toy, a learning tool, and a lightweight utility, not a replacement for a PC or tablet.

"But for Raspberry Pi to offer what a laptop offers it might be at the same cost." This sentence is the sum total of your point - and it's rather silly. The raspberry pi is by no means attempting to be a laptop.

I'm going to give it a few weeks and see how it goes, but I'm already starting to think of it as more of a real server and less of a toy. Add a couple more Pogoplugs and old hard drives, a very small UPS, and all of a sudden you're talking about a load-balanced cluster with full redundancy and failover. For around $100. And pulling less than one amp, total. How cool is that?

There seems to be a ton of people who don't get what the RPI is intended for. I have read on many occasions that people compare them to smartphones, mini ITX systems, tablets and the likes. They are all missing the point.

You have to compare the RPI to things like the Arduino. It is not a consumption device and that it can be used to do XBMC stuff is not the purpose, but a nice gimmick.Think of it as a crazily overpowered microcontroller with a framebuffer. Then you see why some el cheapo Chinese tablet is not going to cut it. Even if they had GPIO pins, I wouldn't want to waste my time breaking them open and soldering some kind of header to them, only to find out using them is flaky for one reason or the other.

Hence the purchase of this. True it's no Raspberry PI, but they didn't exist when I bought it.

I'm going to give it a few weeks and see how it goes, but I'm already starting to think of it as more of a real server and less of a toy. Add a couple more Pogoplugs and old hard drives, a very small UPS, and all of a sudden you're talking about a load-balanced cluster with full redundancy and failover. For around $100. And pulling less than one amp, total. How cool is that?

There seems to be a ton of people who don't get what the RPI is intended for. I have read on many occasions that people compare them to smartphones, mini ITX systems, tablets and the likes. They are all missing the point.

You have to compare the RPI to things like the Arduino. It is not a consumption device and that it can be used to do XBMC stuff is not the purpose, but a nice gimmick.Think of it as a crazily overpowered microcontroller with a framebuffer. Then you see why some el cheapo Chinese tablet is not going to cut it. Even if they had GPIO pins, I wouldn't want to waste my time breaking them open and soldering some kind of header to them, only to find out using them is flaky for one reason or the other.

It is appropriate that the Pi is named after an irrational number since the massive hype about it is, IMO, irrational.

I do understand the embedded market and the requirements of developing for it and I don't see what the massive fuss is about. - It is a nice target for fooling around with, but so are numerous other cheap hardware platforms. - It runs Linux. This is its true strength. Other platforms also run Linux, but I don't think they are at this price point.- It's reasonably cheap. Other platforms are available from $4.30 (TI) up to a few hundred $ with many being heavily subsidized by the chip manufacturers to generate interest. - It has a strong developer community. Many of these other communities also include free source code and developer tools provided by the manufacturers as well.

In other words, it is a nice target for a particular type of experimentation, but far from being the ultimate solution. If you're blindly considering buying one of these because it's "cool", I strongly suggest that you check out the rest of the market first. You may find that there is something that better fits what you hope to accomplish.

Raspberry Pi is not just better hardware/software for education and tinkering around. It supports a good cause and a good organization. I'd rather spend money on the Raspberry Pi and its backers than some for-profit slave-labor produced Chinese or Korean device. And of course much of the components were still made under less than unionized working conditions, but it's a step in the right direction.

And I think this is the future of 'consumer linux'. Linux has always been for hobbyists and having simple, cheap 'mascot' type hardware is a brilliant approach for open source and education, particularly in our coming robotic age and with PCs becoming near disposable already. Certainly it's a stronger idea than Ubuntu's recent attempts at monetization.

The primary reason this was created was for education. A quick look at their site http://www.raspberrypi.org/ pretty much tells the tale. Take a look at the site, you'll be amazed what people are doing with this little miracle.

Life of (Raspberry) Pi, though it has sold a million units the future (debatably) does not look bright based on what it has to offer. A gadget for $25 or $35 (Amazon shows over $40 and if there are taxes it would be closer to $50) with no screen (yes, the aim is different) has to compete with tablets (Akash Tablet) that are available for $35. Minor modifications to tablet can be a Pi Killer.

It is true that the (unsubsidized, delivered-right-to-your-door, quantity 1, price for 7 inch android tablets in the GHz range with capacitive touchscreens and firmware builds of unknown quality; but at least not resistive) going rate from a zillion unrecognizable pacific rim OEMs is about 60-80 bucks, depending on feature details and phase of the moon. (DX has a representative selection, and while they are a pretty bare-bones reseller, no fancy customer support and properly localized manuals and stuff, they are a perfectly genuine storefront: though some of the goods may be caveat emptor, they do generally replace DOAs and such).

The Akash, by contrast, is a bit of a problem child. The NYT has an article up about the logistical hurdles and togetherness problems, and a similar piece made slashdot a short while ago. The $35 price point was always the subsidized-under-Indian-educational-initiative price, with the target market price of about twice that. Unlike their miscellaneous Chinese brethren, it appears that they aren't even going to get that far.

Akash project's imminent doom aside, it is true that anybody buying an RPi to try to bodge it into a tablet or netbook is either a moron, or has an economically-futile-but-perfectly-valid Ben Heck modder hobby. The RPi's real strengths are its in the fact that you can get a full-mostly-normal-linux computer with both some GPIO(not as much as a good microcontroller; but some) and some of the PC conveniences you are used to(like genuine USB host, RAM that isn't measured in kilobytes, enough power that you can just hack stuff out in python and let the processor suck it up, etc.) for essentially the price and footprint of an Arduino.

Nothing against Arduinos, they are a great friendly-learning-curve microcontroller environment; but they hit their upper bounds pretty fast once you start trying to do projects that involve much networking. Hey, if I buy a $25-$30 dollar Arduino, and then add a $50 wifi shield, and stack a USB host shield on top of that.... The RPi is a bit feeble in terms of ADC/DAC and PWM, in ways that microcontrollers aren't; but they've got good GPIO by weedy-little-arm-board standards, and, unlike the microcontroller, they don't shrug at running their own webserver, or doing similarly nontrivial networking work on the side.

[quote=In other words, it is a nice target for a particular type of experimentation, but far from being the ultimate solution. If you're blindly considering buying one of these because it's "cool", I strongly suggest that you check out the rest of the market first. You may find that there is something that better fits what you hope to accomplish.[/quote]

Agreed! Please take this poster's suggestion and go buy something else. Everyone! Then maybe demand will fall enough so I can purchase a couple of dozen for my 24/7/365 always on low power no noise tiny footprint projects.

I used my Pi (B) as a http server to distribute proceedings papers at a conference at the beginning of the month. Stuck it on an old WiFi router to let people with tablets or [ultra|net]books who can't use the CD-ROM we include with registration get the files. (Printed instructions told them how to connect to the network and to type 10.1.2.3 into their browser.) Only about 1% of the attendees used it this time, but I expect that will grow in future years.

I guess that doesn't exactly count as home use. I do have another SD card on which I put Openelec/XBMC which was pretty cool, but not having invested in a wireless USB remote, it didn't displace our 1st-gen Roku from the actual home theater.

Hence the purchase of this. True it's no Raspberry PI, but they didn't exist when I bought it.

That's a nice board indeed, even if Mouser quotes me ~150€ for one. This kind of thing the Pi competes with.

@ YAAAI'm not intending to buy one atm and even less so because it might be considered hip.

To me the points about it being reasonably cheap and running Linux are quite important. There is a ton of software available and putting this thing on a network is a magnitude of order easier than doing the same thing with other platforms, as an example.

The Open Source spirit behind the project also is something that I'm more sympathetic towards than sponsored evaluation boards from manufacturers. I'm well aware that it is not really Open Source in some ways, though.

If this justifies the hype or not is another topic I don't really care about. My point was that it does not compete with smartphones, tablets or mini ITX PCs, not that it would be a magic bullet in the field it competes.

I do understand the embedded market and the requirements of developing for it and I don't see what the massive fuss is about. .

What you don't understand is how it opens the cheap, embedded experimentation market to nearly anyone, with a huge community for learning. It's indeed, not intended for corporate/industrial consumption (Though, certainly capable), but it enables small home tinkering projects and learning, even small/medium sized businesses or nonprofit organizations can easily implement these to do things like kiosks, and run little displays.

an IRL friend is considering using one to restore screen functionality in old military devices, and can throw an arduino wired up to many switches and toggles on the device to give functionality that visitors can play with and see, rather than contract it out to some exorbitantly priced third party. $30, 30 lines of code and you have a neat little radar display.

Doing so with a TI or one of the more industrial embedded processors requires a lot of learning and knowledge, but with an Arduino and rasPi, you can learn it in 15-20minutes, and theres minimal financial investment. That is why these are flying off the shelves.

I've got 3 Pis so far, 1 Rev A Model B and 2 Rev B. One is at my parents house for XMBC usage. One thing people forget about the utility of using a Pi for XMBC is the CEC support. I plugged the Pi into their TV via HDMI plugged in power and they were off! The TV remote does all the work, don't even need an extra remote for the movies! It's ideal for them. The CEC box for a HTPC is the cost of the Pi all by itself.

I've got one of the others doing the same for me here, and the third is a Raspbian box for Linux learning and fun. I can't wait to get a couple more

One thing people forget about the utility of using a Pi for XMBC is the CEC support. I plugged the Pi into their TV via HDMI plugged in power and they were off! The TV remote does all the work, don't even need an extra remote for the movies! It's ideal for them. The CEC box for a HTPC is the cost of the Pi all by itself.

Yes, I love the CEC capability of the Pi. No extra remote is awesome! Too bad current videocards don't have CEC built into them, but the Pi is holding up quite well as a mediacentre.

The guys that started this literally mortgaged their homes to be able to start producing them. They're actually producing them at a far higher rate than they ever intended to, and they even completely switched how they're produced to try to better meet the demand (which delayed the initial production rounds for a while).

The amount of content free articles covering the rpi on various tech sites over the last couple years suggests to me that they've been investing a fair bit of effort in marketing. This, along with its very low price, doesn't exactly jive with expecting to sell small numbers. If you want to hype everyone on your product with weekly spam, it's a reasonable expectation for consumers to be able to get one in a timely fashion.

Similar to the Ouya console, the tech community at large seems to be hypersensitive to any criticism of the rpi, valid or otherwise.

For me it serves as a webserver I use continually during development of web applications, to test and optimize before deployment. I could have used a VM, but I find this to be a better testbed in that it's a more realistic environment in regards to deployment, than just running an internal VM. I actually setup the PI in a friend's home as well, so it's not even on my local network. I just SSH for whatever I need.

I have the B Rev 2 one, that's no enclosure. It has Ethernet.I won't say that it's an essential piece of hardware to have, not for me, but I do find the whole thing amusing.

I am sure with such a small thing there's a ton of black hat uses, if you're just a little bit creative. Other than that I've been thinking about setting up an "array" of them to do... eh, I don't know, just for fun. BOINC?

I work as a teacher in elementary school and our budget is pretty cramped, but one Raspberry PI per student is a cheap setup. It has enough power for me to teach basic computer science and programming.

The guys that started this literally mortgaged their homes to be able to start producing them. They're actually producing them at a far higher rate than they ever intended to, and they even completely switched how they're produced to try to better meet the demand (which delayed the initial production rounds for a while).

The amount of content free articles covering the rpi on various tech sites over the last couple years suggests to me that they've been investing a fair bit of effort in marketing. This, along with its very low price, doesn't exactly jive with expecting to sell small numbers. If you want to hype everyone on your product with weekly spam, it's a reasonable expectation for consumers to be able to get one in a timely fashion.

Similar to the Ouya console, the tech community at large seems to be hypersensitive to any criticism of the rpi, valid or otherwise.

Having to completely change how a product is produced right before release to actually be able to have any hope of satisfying the demand does jive with expecting to sell small numbers. The Pi foundation was completely blindsided by the level of demand for the Pi, and if you were following the project you can see how their expectations were much lower, they didn't have any clue the hobbyist community would go crazy for the Pi.

Of course the cheap price point is to try to sell more... but their ultimate goal is to sell them to schools, for educational use in electronics classes. They want them to be cheap enough that schools won't be super paranoid about kids damaging them (unlike with a $200 computer, or even a $70 tablet!). The ones being sold to the public are intended to subsidize the kit being sold to the schools (IIRC, Model A with a manual, case, and maybe a few other things, for just $25).

Getting one can be fairly quick (I've seen many people get it shipped within a week of ordering), or it can take several months like mine (but I got mine quite a while ago, early on when there was a backlog of hundreds of thousands and no third-party retailers selling them). That's a legitimate complaint, but it's dying, and not entirely fair. The rest of the complaints I see? They generally miss the point of the Pi, and think things such as a $200 device without any of the I/O or flexibility of the Pi is the same... or a tablet without I/O, and costs twice as much, and will never have a large community of developers around it pushing the hardware to the limits.

Of course the cheap price point is to try to sell more... but their ultimate goal is to sell them to schools, for educational use in electronics classes. They want them to be cheap enough that schools won't be super paranoid about kids damaging them (unlike with a $200 computer, or even a $70 tablet!). The ones being sold to the public are intended to subsidize the kit being sold to the schools (IIRC, Model A with a manual, case, and maybe a few other things, for just $25).

Got my son the model B for his birthday tomorrow. Important to keep in mind that once you've added in all the extras like a power supply, case and SD card the price will be a bit more than $25. And that's still assuming you have a keyboard, mouse and display for it.

Even so, it's a great deal for a starter "computer kit." Excited to see what he'll do with his.

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Raspberry Pi or what hacks you can do with them. Since they're near impossible to actually GET

I just ordered mine from Amazon...? Came in two days, it was trivial to get.